How to Recognize Your Gilded Cage

Imagine a beautiful atrium.

It’s inside the lobby of a grand building, with high ceilings, and a regular stream of people in and out the doors. There are beautiful skylights in the ceiling, and the sunlight streams in through them, richly. It’s warm inside — not too warm, but warmer than outside, and its protected from the elements by two sets of doors — a little like an airlock. Someone has taken the care to grow trees in the atrium, and some of those trees bear a small amount of fruit.

Imagine a bird manages to get through those doors.

It doesn’t realize it’s surroundings have shifted at first — it just keeps going about its bird-y business. It lands on a tree and eats some fruit, and happily chirps its song. The building is a business building, and so, in time, it shuts down, and the doors are locked. The bird flies around, but as the lights dim and the sun starts to set, it settles into a tree to sleep, the same way it would in any other tree.

In the morning, the sun rises, streams in through the sunlights, and the bird wakes up, singing its bird-y song. People come back to work, and stream through the building. They order food at the restaurants in the lobby, and eat in the same atrium the bird is in. They drop bits of food as they do so, providing plenty of nourishment for the bird. In fact, the bird is a beautiful variety, and so people intentionally leave it food. Just so they can see it up close.

The bird has more food than it could ever want, and so it’s happy, and sings its song, and spends the day inside the atrium. The next day, the bird wakes up to sunlight streaming in through the skylights. This day, it feels like stretching its flight muscles, so it spends the day flying up high, soaring towards the ceiling, and then diving back down towards the tree its making its home.

The feeling of the air on its wings is invigorating, and the bird feels especially safe in this new place its found. All the predators it normally has to keep an eye out for seem to be absent. It doesn’t mind — the sun feels so good on its wings today, if a little more muted than normal. The bird has a great day, and as it winds down its day, it decides to start building a home. It’s found heaven — all the food it could want, trees to call a home and to build a nest, interesting people to watch and observe, and the ability to soar in the sun’s rays without fear of being caught.

There’s just one problem.

As time wears on, the bird feels a yearning. It doesn’t understand why it’s feeling this way — it has everything it could want for, and then some. It’s never felt more safe and secure.

And yet it feels … restless.

It starts practising aerobatic maneuvers as it flies, thinking perhaps it just needs more variety in its life. And while that provides some interest at first, it’s fleeting — it wanes quickly.

As the years pass, at first, the bird feels a sharpening of this yearning. It grows and starts to gnaw. Something feels like its missing. For a while, the bird tries to sort out what it is. It tries flying higher, more daringly, to places it hasn’t uncovered yet. And while all of that provides temporary relief, none of it makes a difference in the long-term.

The little voice of yearning stays, and grows.

Until one day, the bird has had enough with this voice.

Like getting frustrated with our partners in a marriage, the bird decides, “I’ve had it! I’ve tried to do everything to address this voice, and nothing satisfies or shuts it up. The problem must just be me.”

The bird changes tack. It decides to quell the voice. (Frankly, it’s getting in the way of the peace and quiet the bird has created in this sacred space).

The bird quell’s the voice any number of ways. It eats the food left behind, and puts care and attention in to savouring it. It makes its nest look extra pretty, adding to it with jewels and gems that fall off of the people’s clothing as they walk through the atrium.

Over the years, the yearning starts to dim. The voice gets weaker. The bird feels like its won a hard fought victory.

But what it doesn’t realize is the victory it has won is over its heart.

It’s overcome the longing in its heart — the longing for its truest self. It has overcome its longing to soar in the clouds. To know the dangers of the worlds and to soar through the skies in the face of them.

We all build atriums in our lives, and then actively try to forget the world we are protecting ourselves from (and simultaneously yearning for).

The Smartest Person in the Room builds better atriums than anyone else.

They look beautiful, and have everything you could ever want.

And they’re a prison.

A prison of your own making.

What would you give that bird?

Like that bird, your destiny is to soar in the sky, high above the clouds, exhilarated and thrilled, allowing for the dangers that come from living life fully expressed.

That’s the life of a leader. That’s the life waiting for you.

How much longer?